Friday, February 3, 2012

What's keeping you?

I was having a bad day yesterday. Then this happened.

Several of us were shooting the breeze before an in house seminar got started, and my views on my impending emigration came up. Because of aforementioned bad day, I did not speak kindly of my future home, blaming it for the separation that my little family faces now, and will continue to face. "Right now, I hate anything that is keeping my little family apart."

"What's keeping you from being with your family?" I cannot for the life of me tell you who the inquirer was. There's a one in three chance that he actually didn't know my familial situation. Selfishly, I chose not to expose my already raw feelings to an honest discussion of the delicacies and complications involved.

I could have said "My failure to be enough of a superstar to walk into any city and demand that a university in that city give me a job."

Or, if I was feeling more double X empowered, I might have said "My partner's failure to give up his academic dreams to find a job near me."

It always makes me nervous to talk about the possibility of leaving academia to solve a 2 body problem, though the possibility does hang miasmically in my peripheral vision. Eventually we all agreed that it wasn't so much my inability to leave academia as it was my probably subsequent inability to reenter it if I chose that route.

Oh wit of the stairs. Why do you haunt me? I practise my one-liners dutifully in the shower. Why fail me now?

About Me

I am a post doc in a STEM field with a 2+ epsilon body problem that is iteratively solving itself. My family recently changed countries. I spend a lot of time thinking about inequality in education, gender, race, class. Recently I seem to be writing about different ways things are done in my new home country. Sometimes I write poetry.